Surprisingly, this isn't clickbait. It's more that it's a qualitative rather than quantitative analysis. It's more of a cultural and psychological impact piece. I expected something basically dismissing AI as a mass-delusion.

I can't say the author is _wrong_ in their chosen examples like "re-animating a dead kid to interview an AI version of them in the news" That's flat out bizarre. The AGI hype, the whole "every job will be displaced" moving bar.

I say this as an AI maximalist. Progress <> permission. We do need more accuracy, safety, and the players to disclose synthetic content.

The real danger is rebuilding social institutions around "mid" models and only later noticing we've gone wrong -- not Skynet -- but information quality, consent, energy, labor, etc.

Great piece.

Also, thinking about Sam Altman talking to Theo Von about Dyson spheres kinda makes me want to live on a different planet.

archive.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20250818211916/https://www.theat...

archive.today and siblings are putting up full captchas with motorcycles and crosswalks for my phone and I prefer dinner to debugging.

Jim Acosta is a mass delusion event.

All media technologies seem weird at first. 19th century Europeans fled from the first movies of trains, expecting to be struck by the moving image. Deep jungle tribes believe that photographs steal a piece of your soul. I myself remember spending hours on YTMND 20 years ago. The early internet was Weird and Fresh and exciting. So if GenAI makes established, successful people feel weird and confused, then to me that seems like a good sign.

The second Tulip mania passed by almost unnoticed yet it's AI getting all the hate?

Anyone seen some NFT tulips still for sale?

The problem with AI is the marketing is both cringe and retarded even though the product is genuinely useful.

> The feeling of instability she describes is a hallmark of the generative-AI era.

This is by design. Power-hungry billionaires thrive in chaos. God governed countries and the rule of law do not allow for the level of inequality that we are seeing today.

AI is just another tool to sell fear to citizens in the developed world. Fear to lose their jobs, fear to lose the opportunity to invest in the next big thing, fear to be outgun on wars, fear to not be part of “A new era for humanity”.

I love when well articulated and informed journalists put into words things that many of us only understand instinctively.

> Earlier this month, OpenAI released GPT-5, to mixed reviews. Altman had promised “a Ph.D.-level” intelligence on any topic.

When investors put their money on words and fantasy not on sound business we are in for a hard landing of the economy.

Unsurprising. Your virtual girlfriends are just linear algebra and the ELIZA effect.

Mass-delusional events remind me of the dancing plague.

Reading the article, or having a good model rewrite it, substituting with the dancing plague is surprisingly grounding.

A model spat out for me an interpretive dance version of the first example. It remained hard to read.

The problem is the industry hasn't solved the conduit metaphor paradox, so AI will always remain a magic act in public view that goes nowhere and a a specific tool that can help solve real problems in chemistry and biology. As a general tool it can never work. Words are arbitrary, they're meaningless.